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Yesterday

Why Do We Scratch an Itch?

The science of itching is fascinating and strange. In 2008, Atul Gawande wrote what may be the definitive work of popular science journalism on the issue. In "The Itch," he wrote about the neuroscience of itching and its many causes—including remarkable… Read more

The science of itching is fascinating and strange. In 2008, Atul Gawande wrote what may be the definitive work of popular science journalism on the issue. In "The Itch," he wrote about the neuroscience of itching and its many causes—including remarkable cases in which some circuitry had clearly gone wrong, driving people mad with the need to scratch (the piece includes one unforgettable account of a woman who involuntarily scratched through her own skull and into brain tissue).

But the question is, which neural circuitry was going haywire, causing the pathological itching? Today, researchers report in the journal Science (abstract) that they may have found an answer. Using mice genetically modified to have light-sensitive neurons—a fascinating area of biotechnology known as optogentics—they shined lights into the animals' brains. The light switched off a circuit in an area called the parabrachial nucleus, a part of the brain stem, and stopped the mice from scratching after being presented with a itchy stimulus. Sweet relief—and hope, perhaps, for chronic scratchers everywhere.

According to the report, the institute, which would carry out both basic and applied climate research, is being supported by all of the University of California campuses, as well as Stanford and CalTech. Those involved with the plan expect to work up a proposal that they’ll present to state lawmakers later this year, with the hope of setting up the organization by September 2018. But as one cautious commentator points out to Nature, there will be huge demand for the cap-and-trade system’s allocated cash flows—so for now, the plans remain little more than an idea.

Such problems are so prevalent in Chinese society, many people don’t recognize certain behavior amounts to sexual harassment or discrimination, which is illegal in China—though generally the laws aren’t policed. Job ads sometimes say only men need apply.

She also points out that women in China’s Internet firms are still paid on average 30 percent less than men. Among the boards of directors of the country's Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, there is only one woman.

None of this, of course, makes Damore’s comments any more acceptable. But it does highlight that China has an even steeper mountain to climb than America when it comes to leveling the playing field for women working in tech.

Making Friends with Your Hacker Can Change Your Life

When Negar Mottahedeh’s Instagram account got hijacked four months ago, something rather unusual happened. Filled with rage, she confronted her hacker in order to reclaim her photo-sharing account. And while that did (ultimately) have the desired effect,… Read more

When Negar Mottahedeh’s Instagram account got hijacked four months ago, something rather unusual happened. Filled with rage, she confronted her hacker in order to reclaim her photo-sharing account. And while that did (ultimately) have the desired effect, it gave rise to something rather unexpected: a friendship with her hacker.

The pair talked about Persian stews and jaunts to the Caspian Sea. They exchanged music. She consoled him when he spoke about his abusive father. But, perhaps most striking of all, he showed Mottahedeh what life was like in Iran, the country that she left when she was seven years old. Her full account of the experience on Wired is fascinating, touching, and also rather surreal.

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August 16, 2017

White Supremacists Have Stumbled Into a Huge Issue in Genetic Ancestry Testing

Neo-Nazis, it turns out, dig gene tests—but they often don't like the results. Two sociologists, Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, plowed through years of posts on the white-supremacist website Stormfront in search of accounts of people taking genetic… Read more

Neo-Nazis, it turns out, dig gene tests—but they often don't like the results. Two sociologists, Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, plowed through years of posts on the white-supremacist website Stormfront in search of accounts of people taking genetic ancestry tests to prove their whiteness. The pair tracked 153 users who'd gotten tested as they discussed their results across 3,000 posts on the site. About two-thirds of them were disappointed with the results, which found that they had something other than white European ancestry in their genome. An excellent piece in Stat on the work talks about how the online community dealt with inconvenient findings. Suffice it to say, things quickly got weird.

Amazingly, though, as the racists scrambled to find ways to discredit the tests, they stumbled into a very real controversy among scientists. The companies that perform the tests, like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, strive to put numbers to the genetic variants they detect. So you might receive, as one prominent white supremacist did, a test claiming that your genes are 86 percent European and 14 percent sub-Saharan African.

As the Stat piece says, testing companies do a lot of work to try to validate these numbers—but they're incredibly hard to pin down. People move around a lot, and our ideas about what constitutes a genetic group by geography are, as a result, pretty fuzzy. That may give racists some wiggle room to question results they don't like. But it also means that any attempts to prove racial "purity" go from simply grotesque to, genetically speaking, completely absurd.

Hacker Whose Tools Were Used in DNC Hack Steps Forward

A Ukrainian hacker called "Profexer" who built one of the tools used to penetrate the Democratic National Committee servers last year has turned himself in to authorities. According to a report today in the New York Times, the man, who first contacted… Read more

A Ukrainian hacker called "Profexer" who built one of the tools used to penetrate the Democratic National Committee servers last year has turned himself in to authorities. According to a report today in the New York Times, the man, who first contacted Ukranian police earlier this year, claims he wrote a piece of software called the PAS Web shell, which the Department of Homeland Security has identified as malware used in the hack.

But the hacker maintains that he wasn't behind the attack, which resulted in the release of thousands of e-mails sent by DNC staffers in the thick of last year's U.S. presidential election season. “He told us he didn’t create it to be used in the way it was,” the chief of the Ukrainian Cyber Police, Serhiy Demediuk, told the Times. Because there is no evidence that he used the tool to carry out the attack, he wasn't arrested.

Profexer is now in touch with the FBI, and the big question is how the information he provides squares with the overwhelming consensus in the U.S. intelligence community that Russian operatives were behind the attack—in particular a government-run hacking group known as Fancy Bear. According to the Times report, Profexer was able to identify users involved in the DNC hack by their online handles (the full article is riveting, by the way, and also covers some of Russia's history of using Ukraine as a lab for honing its tactics in cyberattacks).

Microsoft Is Training AI Gliders to Fly Themselves

Last week in the Nevada desert, Microsoft researchers threw a glider into the air, then left it to its own devices hoping that it would fly for hours. But they’re not as foolhardy as they sound: the New York Times reports that their Styrofoam aircraft… Read more

Last week in the Nevada desert, Microsoft researchers threw a glider into the air, then left it to its own devices hoping that it would fly for hours. But they’re not as foolhardy as they sound: the New York Times reports that their Styrofoam aircraft is loaded with AI to study data from onboard sensors, predict conditions, and seek out thermals to keep it aloft. The long-term goal: to have the aircraft fly for days to track weather or deliver Internet to rural areas. That's much like the aim of Alphabet’s Project Loon, which also uses AI to help control its stratospheric balloons. But the Loon balloons can only use inflation to move up or down: Microsoft’s glider has far more decisions (and turns) to make in order to stay aloft.

Need a Polio Vaccine? Get a Plant to Grow It for You

Researchers from the U.K.'s John Innes Center have hijacked tobacco plants to have them produce a polio vaccine. Writing in Nature Communications, the team explains that they inserted genes from the polio virus into soil bacteria that's been engineered… Read more

Researchers from the U.K.'s John Innes Center have hijacked tobacco plants to have them produce a polio vaccine. Writing in Nature Communications, the team explains that they inserted genes from the polio virus into soil bacteria that's been engineered to infect plants. That causes the plants to produce something that looks like the polio virus, but is stripped of its harmful attributes, making it perfect for training people's immune systems to fight the disease without causing infection. The vaccine, once extracted, protects mice from polio. The team tells the BBC that it could create vaccines for viruses like Zika, too.

Image credit:

John Innes Center

2 days ago

August 15, 2017

Inside the Self-Driving Bromance of Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

Uber and Waymo's nasty legal dispute has taken a strange turn, as the release of a series of text messages between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and his star self-driving-car engineer, Anthony Levandowski, charts the blossoming of a close connection… Read more

Uber and Waymo's nasty legal dispute has taken a strange turn, as the release of a series of text messages between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and his star self-driving-car engineer, Anthony Levandowski, charts the blossoming of a close connection between the two.

For those unfamiliar, Waymo has alleged that Levandowski stole secrets related to its lidar system and brought them with him to Uber. The lawsuit has become a blockbuster, because depending on the ruling, it could severely damage Uber's plans—which have already taken several hits—to roll out self-driving taxis across its massive ride-hailing network. As part of the suit, Waymo thought texts between the two might shed light on whether Kalanick, and by extension Uber, was indeed after the trade secrets.

It offers up some interesting gems, including the fact that Levandowski and Kalanick both paid a lot of attention to Tesla:

9/14/2016 Levandowski: Tesla crash in January … implies Elon is lying about millions of miles without incident. We should have LDP on Tesla just to catch all the crashes that are going on.

9/22/2016: We’ve got to start calling Elon on his shit. I'm not on social media but let's start "faketesla" and start give physics lessons about stupid shit Elon says like [saying his cars don’t need lidar]

Levandowski also spent time schooling Kalanick in the intricacies of self-driving technology, and Kalanick was more than happy to hand out management advice in return. The hoped-for bombshell that would prove Uber illegally used Waymo's proprietary technology isn't there, but you can still check out the choice cuts over at IEEE Spectrum.

Here Come the Mind-Blowing Smartphone Sensors That Could Bring AR to the Masses

Over the course of the next year, get ready for phones to get some awesome new imaging capabilities. We're talking more than just a tweak to the camera, or stereoscopic vision. Think full-on depth sensing and mapping.

Over the course of the next year, get ready for phones to get some awesome new imaging capabilities. We're talking more than just a tweak to the camera, or stereoscopic vision. Think full-on depth sensing and mapping.

Today, Qualcomm released a video demonstrating the abilities of its next-generation Snapdragon mobile processor and "active depth sensing" sensor package, in which thousands of dots of infrared light map objects in three dimensions in real time (check out the inset in the video above). Qualcomm avoids calling it lidar, but the effect is the similar: any device with active depth-sensing on board gains the ability to gauge the shape of objects and their distance to within about 0.1mm, the company claims. The Verge notes that Android phones featuring the new Snapdragon chips and sensor could be available in 2018.

That might be a little bit behind the timeline Apple is planning for its first phone equipped with laser range-finding. In July, it was widely reported that such hardware may be unveiled at Apple's annual event in the fall. We thought that made a lot of sense, as Apple is clearly pushing the development of augmented reality apps for iOS, and super-accurate depth sensing would be a key technology for helping AR take off on mobile devices.